Reposted by tolkienisms
Reminder: Tolkien was not comfortable with the black and white view of the orcs. He struggled with that. The orcs didn’t like Sauron. They weren’t utterly ‘evil to their core’ across the board. Anyone who doesn’t realise that did not pay attention to his dilemma.
Tolkien is not your bigotry shield.
![In a 1954 letter, Tolkien wrote that Orcs were "fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today."[T 18] The Tolkien scholar Zach Watkins wrote that Tolkien had "constructed the orcs to be at least potentially moral beings".[20] Robert T. Tally wrote in Mythlore that despite the uniform presentation of orcs as "loathsome, ugly, cruel, feared, and especially terminable", "Tolkien could not resist the urge to flesh out and 'humanize' these inhuman creatures from time to time", in the process giving them their own morality.[2] Stentor Danielson describes the Orcs as cutting trees "just for fun" and "out of pride in their ability to do so", noting that the character Treebeard calls the behaviour "orc-mischief".[21]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:atni5fzv5e7ly35x7md2k4cs/bafkreih6ay5ghl5dbyk3lfajn2xjtvfw7mjf5rdnjhugepzylwuittxzhm)
![Tolkien attempted to resolve the dilemma about his Orcs by proposing several semi-contradictory theories for their origins. In The Tale of Tinúviel, Orcs originate as "foul broodlings of Melkor who fared abroad doing his evil work".[T 19] In The Silmarillion, Orcs are primal Elves "corrupted and enslaved", tortured, and bred by Melkor "in envy and mockery of the Elves"; later on, Elves of Beleriand thought them "perhaps to be Avari who had become evil and savage in the wild; in which they guessed all too near, it is said."[T 4] They bred like Elves and Men: "For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar".[T 4]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:atni5fzv5e7ly35x7md2k4cs/bafkreidoyv47htdnub6qqwuq3jvcvz43yitiq2apct4xn4zzde672k6xo4)
